Andrew Jackson: Brilliant guy

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Andrew Jackson: Brilliant guy

To take from the people the right of bearing arms and put their weapons of defense in the hands of a standing army would be scarcely more dangerous to their liberties than to permit the Government to accumulate immense amounts of treasure beyond the supplies necessary to its legitimate wants. Such a treasure would doubtless be employed at some time, as it has been in other countries, when opportunity tempted ambition.

In other words, it makes no more sense to take from the people the right to bear arms than it does for the government to accumulate monies beyond what is necessary to support its legitimate obligations. To him, either action would lead a government, tempted with ambition, to endanger the liberties of the people. Note his clear distinction between a standing army vs the right of the people to bear arms.

I didn't think much of Jackson (for many reasons) until I read Lions of the West, Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion, by Robert Morgan. A marvelous read on a number of notable figures in history. It really filed a gap in my knowledge in US history, as well as more fully developing a better understanding of the framework the the myriad characters worked in at the time.

America’s Manifest destiny comes to life in Robert Morgan’s skilled hands, from Thomas Jefferson’s birth in 1743 to the California Gold rush in 1849. Jefferson, a naturalist and visionary, dreamed that the United States would stretch across the continent from ocean to ocean. The account of how that dream became reality unfolds in the stories of Jefferson and nine other Americans whose adventurous spirits and lust for land pushed the westward boundaries: Andrew Jackson, John “Johnny Appleseed” Chapman, David Crockett, Sam Houston, James K. Polk, Winfield Scott, Kit Carson, Nicholas Trist, and John Quincy Adams. Their tenacity was matched only by that of their enemies—the Mexican army under Santa Anna at the Alamo, the Comanche and Apache Indians, and the forbidding geography itself.

Morgan makes Jackson a more sympathetic character than my personal perception allowed, but does so in a fashion to explain it more as a function of the time in history and the inexorable tide of settlers westward.

"He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a wolf of the Steppes. He had learned a good deal . . . and was a fairly clever fellow. What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life. The cause of this apparently was that at the bottom of his heart he knew all the time (or thought he knew) that he was in reality not a man, but a wolf of the Steppes."